Our Future is in the Air

by Corballis, Tim

  Fellow students? Childhood friends? What situations might he be in? Marcus searched through the drawers. He didn’t imagine himself as any kind of detective. The drawers contained further papers, pens and other stationery. In the second one down was an address book. It was old and thumbed, but something about it suggested it hadn’t been opened in a while. It was perhaps only that it lay under the other contents of the drawer, pushed to the back and seemingly forgotten, that made it interesting.

  Marcus, like many people, had not been politically involved since the Labour government came in. His life, his children, his job kept him busy. Had it been a side interest, a transient situation that had no remaining impact on his current life? Did he still feel those times inside him as an influence, part of his personality structure, but something no longer present in his world? Perhaps he felt that if he found Pen, he would also recover something of himself. In any case, he took up the address book, curious about the names it would contain. He looked first under M—there was his own name, the only entry on that page, with an old phone number. In fact, it was the number Marcus had before he met Lilly, and well before Pen moved into this office. Why would Pen have taken this book, with its already outdated number, and kept it in this drawer? There were few other numbers, and nothing obviously written in more recently. They were all mutual friends, Marcus thought. Lilly’s name was there, with her old number and address. Other names were old members of the youth movement or the bookshop, people Marcus knew but hadn’t seen for a long time, presumably also with outdated numbers and addresses. The address book was a kind of map of an old situation, a form of memory. He put it in his pocket.

  He continued to look through the drawers, but there were no other clues. It was possible, he thought, that Heather was right—to the extent that all his concerns about Pen, all his memories and attempts to understand, were just empty tokens of thought, drifting and colliding without meaning. Pen, after all, was somewhere.

  ‘There were Resistance Bookshops in Wellington and the other larger New Zealand cities, and for a very brief time in Dunedin. They were all independent of one another, though they remained in contact. They weren’t the only shops that sold leftist books; there were also bookshops associated with the more orthodox communists and socialists in some centres, and various other independent shops. But we were interested in the choice of the name Resistance. This suggested militancy. They did not tend to be driven by a particular doctrine. They thrived in the general background of protest. They brought together people who were opposed to the establishment.’

  ‘Were they centres for subversive activity?’

  ‘They held material that could be considered subversive. Some of their material could also be considered indecent or pornographic, and some related to the use of forbidden substances and TCF. We suspect that some people associated with them sold drugs, possibly from the shops themselves, and that some also offered TCF—though TCF kit has never been found on any of the bookshop sites. There is no evidence for illegal activity apart from the sale of banned material—largely material that was subsequently banned.’

  ‘Was this because they were good at hiding their activities?’

  ‘It seems unlikely. Because they were non-doctrinaire, they also included a large range of different people of different political positions. They were too busy squabbling, in our opinion. There was talk sometimes of making and using weapons. There were some bomb attacks in Auckland and Wellington in 1969 and 1970, around the time the bookshops started up—the individuals involved probably had some association with the shops.’

  ‘I’m not very interested in the bombs. They were amateurish and caused no disruption to speak of.’

  ‘The Wellington bookshop in particular had a hard time paying its debts. The first bookshop there was burnt down.’

  ‘There was no evidence of police involvement in the arson.’

  ‘When it reopened, they offered shares to members, customers, anyone. They did meet their obligations as an incorporated society. Quite a lot of people volunteered there. It would be difficult to keep track of all of them. But as for the bookshop itself, we think it worked largely on a cultural level.’

  ‘They were outlets for information and propaganda.’

  ‘They hoped to influence people’s opinions, yes. They held material produced by all the different leftist groups, including the Communist Party and the other socialist groups. There was material by Ho Chi Minh, Che Guevara, Mao Tse Tung and so forth. They sold some novels and general countercultural material too.’

  ‘Did they use TCL photographs in their propaganda material? Did they, for example, distribute the Soviet ATOMISED HUMAN picture?’

  ‘We think ATOMISED HUMAN was always controversial among the members of the various bookshops, as were the World Trade Center pictures. Certainly they would have sold publications that included them, as with many of the famous images from Vietnam. But even the Soviet Union has expressed regret for releasing them, as you know. Generally only a minority of leftists ever used them. A lot of people, according to our sources, found the TCL images disturbing because there was no single clear cause or issue associated with them, unlike the Vietnam ones.’

  ‘This is why they are so disturbing to me. There is a wild, unfocused hatred in those images.’

  ‘As for human travelling via TCF, we are not clear what subversive potential there is in it.’

  ‘Anything that takes people to another world must be regarded as suspicious.’

  Marcus had the children with him so that Lilly could spend some hours with Janet. They caught the bus to the new location of the bookshop. ‘Where are we going?’ Dani sat up next to him while Sarah was on his knee.

  ‘Uncle Pen is still missing.’

  ‘Are we going to look for him?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Are you worried, Dad?’

  ‘Yes I am. I’m sure he’s okay though.’

  ‘Maybe he’s not.’

  Sarah was still small enough to carry, and he had her on his hip as they walked up to the shop. She said, ‘Why are we here?’

  Dani said, ‘Is this the bookshop, Dad?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Why had they not brought the children here before? Dani had been at the shop in its old location, but only a few times, when she was a baby. She started dancing, turning and skipping between the tables. ‘Sarah,’ she said, ‘this is where Mum and Dad fell in love!’ She picked up books and pamphlets, then put them down respectfully in their places. She giggled at a semi-obscene cartoon. ‘Dad!’

  Marcus didn’t know the person who sat behind the counter—a young woman. He said to her, ‘It’s quiet in here.’ He let Sarah drop to the floor.

  The woman looked up. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Has Pen Evans come in? I mean, you probably only work here.’

  ‘Just once a week. I never see anyone come in. Sorry, I don’t know Pen Evans.’

  Marcus described him.

  ‘No, sorry. Are you sure you want your kid looking at—’

  ‘She’s fine. Nothing she can’t cope with.’

  ‘Looking at what, Dad?’

  ‘It’s not like she doesn’t live in the world.’

  ‘I hear you.’

  ‘At what, Dad?’

  ‘Oh, there’s just some pictures of nude bodies. And some dead bodies too, probably.’

  ‘Where? Show me!’

  Marcus said, ‘Do you have rooms here? Have people been staying?’

  ‘Yes, the rooms are rented out. There’s also some space upstairs for other groups.’

  ‘I was involved in the Cuba Street shop… and the last shop too for a while.’

  ‘Cool.’

  The occupants of the rooms were all out; the building was quiet. The girls stuck close to him now and pulled at his legs. He wanted to ask more questions. Sarah said, ‘Are we looking for Pen?’

  ‘I don’t think so, honey.’

  ‘Can we go?’

  �
�Yeah.’

  Then they were leaving, and were stepping around a man standing on the front steps, when the man turned to look at them. It took a moment for Marcus to recognise him—Tom P, a radical union and Māori rights activist, and an old friend of Pen’s. The girls found their way behind Marcus.

  ‘Those your kids?’

  ‘Tom! Hi.’

  ‘What are you doing here? I haven’t seen you for—’

  ‘I’ve been doing other things I guess.’

  ‘You sure have. Beautiful.’ A laugh.

  ‘Tom listen, this might be a crazy question, but have you seen Pen?’

  ‘Pen? No. Why? Not in a while.’

  ‘His wife hasn’t seen him in days.’

  ‘Oh shit. That boy, it doesn’t surprise me. He was always up to stuff… ’

  ‘What stuff?’

  ‘Ha! Didn’t you know him better than anyone?’

  ‘Well, he was… I don’t know. What sort of stuff?’

  ‘I don’t know. I didn’t know him that well, but I’m sure people said he was wild.’

  ‘Oh sure, he was wild enough in his way I guess. But why would he walk out on someone? They’ve got a boy, Peter, who’s Dani’s age.’

  ‘Oh, yeah, of course.’

  ‘I’m just wondering if anyone’s seen him.’

  ‘I could ask around. I’m pretty busy right now—organising for this hīkoi. But someone might know… I mean it’s a long shot but it’s worth asking.’

  ‘Oh God, Tom, the march, yeah.’

  ‘You should join us. Bring the kids. Just for the last part if you want.’

  ‘Sure.’ Then: ‘If he was working with someone, doing something with people, Janet would know?’

  ‘Some people are into stuff that Janet wouldn’t hear about. Sorry, Marcus, but I know what some of them get up to and if Pen—’

  ‘Like what?’

  A laugh. ‘Drugs and TCF. Come on, Marcus. I’ll just check. Plenty of your people are into that stuff too, if you thought about it. You been asking around?’

  ‘What people?’

  ‘All your activists from way back. They do plenty of dodgy stuff still, I bet. People get in trouble. I mean it’s a real shame but they do. It’s the kind of thing I heard about him, if you want to know.’

  ‘Pen? Drugs sometimes, sure. But TCF?’

  ‘Yeah. Well, I’ll see.’

  A few years earlier, Marcus had dealt with a patient, Joanie, a young woman who had had trouble following an intense series of TCF trips. She called herself a TCF addict, but Marcus was sceptical of the term—she seemed to be using it for his benefit, as if the label could gain her admittance to something. Was it the first time he had dealt with a TCF user in his practice? He had noticed a change in how it was regarded by the medical profession: formerly a lifestyle choice that psychiatrists may or may not have disapproved of, it was increasingly seen as a problem in itself, something to be cured.

  Joanie had spent time living in various squats around the city, and some nights sleeping rough, though Marcus knew that her parents were alive and well-off and could presumably take her in without trouble. She was, he suspected, running from something in her present, presumably something at home. When Marcus asked to visit it with her, to talk to her other family members, she was horrified. On her TCF trips, however, she herself had been almost obsessed with the house, skulking around outside it, hoping to catch a glimpse of its future occupants. It was almost too easy to see what the travelling offered her: a vision of that house altered, solved, perhaps occupied by strangers or by her parents still but now elderly and weak, or themselves changed and reconciled to their daughter. Perhaps it was his own failing, to see others as mirrors of himself. As too often with his patients, Marcus didn’t think she needed curing.

  When Marcus and Lilly shared a joint and talked about Pen, Lilly said there would have to be options for Janet and Peter to survive without him. It would help to have a conscious support group around Janet, and people to help her with childcare. Was Pen, in that case, unnecessary? And surely, if they believed by now that Pen wouldn’t come back, shouldn’t the police be alerted? Pen’s mother and brother lived in a small town an hour and a half away. Both claimed they hadn’t seen him. His brother, especially, seemed certain that Pen would be back soon, and his mother was comforted to a degree by that thought.

  All Marcus could do was wait. He was at a loss for how to find a missing person. Was it true now that Pen existed for him largely in the past? Even when they had met up in the last few months before he had disappeared, it was mostly to reminisce. The visit to the bookshop had seemed something like a failed attempt to visit the past, to search for Pen in his memories.

  Lilly said, ‘If Pen doesn’t come back soon, we’ll have Janet and Peter move in here.’

  ‘Oh, sure.’ They had two others sharing with them, in upstairs rooms. ‘It might mean clearing out the spare room.’ Then, ‘But how long do we wait?’

  ‘It’s up to her, isn’t it? They can move in any time.’

  ‘Why didn’t they move in years ago? It would have made sense.’

  ‘Living with Pen? You sure about that?’

  ‘Instead of being shut up in that nuclear family over there.’

  ‘Pen wouldn’t have—’

  ‘Yeah. He never liked communes.’

  ‘Communes!’

  ‘He called us that.’

  ‘I know.’ Then, ‘Sometimes he could be a prick. Couldn’t he? I mean, he was so critical, so political about everything that he couldn’t change anything about his life.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘He couldn’t do anything but end up stuck in that patriarchal living situation.’

  ‘Yeah. Not that we’re much better, Lilly.’

  A laugh. ‘No.’ Then, ‘But I’d like this house to be something different.’

  ‘So would I.’

  Pen, they both understood, had made Janet into a kind of victim—only because he had placed her in a situation that was not of her choosing. ‘That,’ said Lilly, ‘is the problem. Men put women into these situations whether they stick around or do a runner.’

  ‘I know. Do you think Pen’s just run off?’

  ‘It’s not his fault, or yours. Who knows? But it’s structural, isn’t it? It’s necessary to earn money and raise children. Structures sustain us while they oppress us—that’s why it’s so hard to change them.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘And now, now there’s something different.’

  ‘He might come back. It hasn’t been so long.’

  ‘It’s been quite a while, Marcus. It’s weird, whatever. And if he doesn’t come back, well, that puts a spanner in the structure, doesn’t it? Gives us a reason, gives Janet a reason to think about something new. We can help her, we’ve got this house. A new structure. I don’t know.’

  ‘Don’t you think it would have been good to have Pen here? I mean… ’

  ‘You think it would’ve been good for him.’

  ‘I mean, he might not have gone off. There might have been more for him, somehow. If it’s not his fault, if it’s just the world weighing on him, well, let him move in here and maybe things, maybe he would be different?’

  ‘You know him better than me.’

  ‘People keep saying that.’

  CHAPTER THREE

  ‘In some sense, it could be said that the world lost the ability to imagine itself. Flight became a rare thing, and with it the thought of looking down on the land. With the general collapse of the aviation industry, aerial photography became too expensive for most purposes—aerial images became a thing of the past. Instead, the imagination of the world was shattered into a million hazy states, seen or experienced, present or future.’

  ‘So we were just beginning to get a sense that the future was opening up. Then it was as if a fog descended, a frustrating, confusing fog. It made me angry to think that all the political possibilities we had imagined for ourselves were being replaced
by vague feelings and pictures. Don’t get me wrong—there was some excitement about those pictures. For a lot of people, they were the first exciting thing they had encountered. But there were too many, more and more, and they could never be put together into a whole.’

  ‘Did TCL images, and, given the brevity of the Korngold period, TCF travel, have the paradoxical effect of REMOVING THE FUTURE—replacing or obscuring the future with a form of image fixation or image addiction?’

  ‘Yes, It was possible that feelings attached too easily to images, so that the flood of imagery, especially future imagery, caused a dissipation of feeling—a dissipation of hope.’

  ‘What about the establishment?’

  ‘Well, here in New Zealand at least I think the cops and the SIS were as confused as anyone. I think they were terrified that they were losing their grip on the world, losing their command. Anyone who’s been face to face with the police in a protest knows that nothing makes a cop angry like the feeling they’re not in control of the situation. It was as if they couldn’t see the world from above, like they’re used to.’

  ‘Well, there was something hopeful, for me. In New Zealand there might be a kind of upsurge of the people. In the absence of the large view, the people might rise up, in the form of a great hum of activity. Take away the aerial view, by all means! And on the other hand we were worried that the people’s great fizz of activity was being diverted into all those pictures.’

  ‘Of course at the time, we weren’t yet clear that the people’s activity meant men’s activity. Men were resisting conscription ballots, men were dominating the meetings and the protests—though, I must say, there were some exceptions—and women found it pretty hard to speak up. Women were still doing all the cooking and cleaning at the collective house at Koromiko Road, for example, and it took a little while for us to realise that.

  ‘So Vietnam was not only about soldiers, but about what soldiers were doing to women and children. Sometimes the men seemed too caught up in their own images of war. Even the hardline pacifists—there were a few—were caught in an IMAGE OF WAR, unable to move, fixated on war. The women were immune to that, but it was a very powerful image for the men. They wanted to fight it, they felt the excitement of fighting. Well, maybe I felt a little bit of the excitement of the fight too, but I wasn’t in love with it.’